A Weird Weather Week

The past week the weather has gone from around 100 degrees to below 90 and cloudy and back to 100 degrees. We even got a few drops of rain on Sunday and Monday!

The inconsistent weather hasn’t had too much of an effect on many of the crops other than that they may ripen quicker when its hotter than when it cools off a little bit.

We haven’t mentioned eggplant much this summer as the plants have not produced much due to the flowers on the plant dropping when it gets above 100 degrees. Unfortunately for us it seems like every time the flowers are about to start forming a fruit it reaches triple digits and the flower drops. We are seeing a few more eggplants on the second planting that are sizing up so we will have a few but not nearly as many as we hoped for.

Our peppers, especially the Jimmy Nardellos, are hitting their stride right now which is exciting. They all have a delicious sweet flavor and are great in so many dishes from raw to fried up.

We have started to harvest a new planting of cucumbers which is great news because the first planting is producing a noticeable amount less. This new planting has an extra bed of striped armenian cucumbers which have sold out at every market we have brought them to so we have been wanting to have more of them.

We have been busy starting to prepare areas for our fall planting of crops. Next week we will start transplanting the first of them including bunching greens, lettuce and broccoli.

They are all growing very well in the greenhouse and we just planted another round of broccoli which germinated in less than 48 hours which is fantastic!

Using the greenhouse to germinate and start plants is tough at this time of the year with the heat as we are not able to cool it down to the preferred temperature of around 70 degrees for those crops. Some farms don’t even start their own plants in July and August, instead buying from a company that does it temperature controlled greenhouse but it is not feasible for us to buy from them at this point.